THE COLD WAR: Marriage in Moscow

A hen is not a bird, nor a woman a human being.

—Russian saying

When Alfred Hall was a proper, young cipher clerk at the British embassy in Moscow, he did a somewhat improper thing: he picked up a Russian girl at a performance of Swan Lake in the Bolshoi. "I brushed up against her," he said. "I apologized. We started talking. She spoke good, if academic, English and there it was." Two months later, Alf Hall and 22-year-old Clara Strumina, student of English (mostly Shakespeare) at the University of Moscow, and daughter of...

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